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Cambridge Coincidences Collection

Professor David Spiegelhalter of Cambridge University wants to know about your coincidences!

I had my horse freeze marked, I had no choice in the numbers they are totally random - the only two numbers amongst the letters were 69
I bought an old Landrover, I didn't notice until I had it that the number plate said 69 (no other numbers)
I moved house, when we got the paperwork I noticed the house number is 69
I started a new job, got my payslip and my payroll number is 69!
What are the chances of that?

my mother comes from a large family and only kept in contact with a couple of her siblings. when i was growing up i knew one of her sisters lived in Benalla (a town 40 mins drive from the town I grew up in) but I had never met her or her family. I also knew the names of her 5 children but that was all and I never gave them or any of my other estranged relatives a thought over the years. i left home at 17 and moved to melbourne where i lived for 10 yrs and then i moved to Benalla (a town of 8000 people )having by then completely forgotten about the fact that i had relatives living there.

my mother comes from a large family and only kept in contact with a couple of her siblings. when i was growing up i knew one of her sisters lived in Benalla (a town 40 mins drive from the town I grew up in) but I had never met her or her family. I also knew the names of her 5 children but that was all and I never gave them or any of my other estranged relatives a thought over the years. i left home at 17 and moved to melbourne where i lived for 10 yrs and then i moved to Benalla (a town of 8000 people )having by then completely forgotten about the fact that i had relatives living there.

as i walked from my loungeroom to my kitchen i started singing (loudly) ruby ruby, the song by dion de mucci from the 50's, (a rare song that not many people know and i rarely sing), and i turned on the radio and that was the song that was playing!

The other day I was having a conversation with my brother about a family friend. Not knowing a lot about this person's past (this person is very private) I started looking up this person via Google. I came across someone with the exact same name and looked identical to the person I was looking up. The person I found was well lets just say not someone you would want anyone to know you are associated with.

I have trouble getting up in the morning, standard for most people. I can set multiple alarms on my iPhone and none of them will even stir my sleep. I became frustrated that I couldn't find something to wake me, I tried several things around the house that I could set an alarm to wake me. Eventually I came to an old Quarts clock that has sat on a mantle piece for as long as I can remember. It also hasn't worked for all that time, but that wasn't due to the actual clock, but because of a missing back panel that held a single AAA battery into place.

This is partly a response to "Who phone who?"
My name is Peter. The (true) story about the "chance discovery of parallel family" is mine. That struck me as interesting because you can prove the whole thing and loosely calculate the probabilities. As a family we have experienced lots of odd coincidences, mainly unlikely meetings.

I picked up my phone to call my daughter and heard someone on the line, I said Hello.
Is that you mum? the voice replied. Some how we'd both picked up our phones at the same time but neither of us had time to dial each others phone numbers. How can this possibly happen?

My daughter at university asked me (October 2014) to check some details about the post-graduate course she is on. A related Google search took me straight to a student society relating uniquely to that course, and I noticed that a member of the student committee (ie someone else currently on the course) had the same surname, which is not common. I looked up her details using free online birth-marriage-death indexes and found that she was born in the same medium-sized town as my daughter, some 100 miles away from the university.